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Indian authors have always been a topic of hot debate. Readers
love to hate them and yet their sales speak a different truth all together. Keeping
this an underlying subtext, Ravi Subramanian begins his latest thriller cum
romance drama ‘The Bestseller She Wrote’. I started reading the book like almost
every book reader does - judging a book by its cover. It’s beautiful, elegant
and invites you in to delve into the story.

We begin with Aditya Kapoor - a banker with a very successful
career as the Director of Branch Banking of National Bank, who is also a bestselling
author of 4 thrillers. You can’t help but make a comparison with the author who
is also a banker and a bestselling author of 4 novels. This alluring start to
the novel gives a feeling of a true story being told as you constantly keep questioning
yourself, maybe this fact is true from the author’ life or that one or this
one. I liked this as it kept me guessing about the facts spread throughout the
book.

Moving to the premise, we meet the 2 key protagonists to the
story in the first few pages of the book. One is Aditya, the other is the
smart, eccentric and bold Shreya Kaushik - a management graduate from IIM Bengaluru.

Their story begins with a heated debate and then we see the
wildly successful author get smitten by the young and wildly ambitious Shreya.

Even though Aditya is married to Maya, a saint of a woman
who left her promising career to boost Aditya’s, and has a kid, it doesn’t
bother him to enter into an adulterous relationship with Shreya. As you keep
reading, you slowly see Shreya’s real character coming out. We then get to know
what Shreya is really capable of and Aditya realizing the real impact of his decisions.

What follows is a series of events straight out of Aditya’s
nightmare as he starts to lose everything that he has so carefully built over
the years. I liked the climax as to how it all came together, but was
disappointed by a few character quirks and too much story being told in the end.

The book has an interesting start, but throughout the novel there
are some chapters that have no overall impact on the story. I strictly believe that
every line written in a story should affect it in one way or another. But in
the book you read some stuff that’s just there for the sake of being there. This
treatment to the story tends to reduce the overall immersion into the book.

However, I liked the pace along with a couple of interesting
characters that include Aditya’s wife Maya and his close friend Sanjay.

After having read only one book by the author - The Bankster
- I have to say, this was a better read in regard with story and character.

You can pick it up if you need a quick read and like romantic
drama with a backdrop of a thriller.

I wanted to rate the book 4 starts but will take half a
point away as there were some really badly written lines like ‘Then why is your
face looking like a roasted brinjal?’